Wildfires reach outskirts of Athens during scorching heatwave

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#Μητσοτακη_γαμιεσαι

PAOK fans today




"solidarity with the victims of the fires"
Μητσοτακη γαμιεσαι

 

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"The catastrophic fires on Evia, the Peloponnese and earlier in Attica seem to have been largely brought under control because of the rain that has fallen and mainly because of the titanic efforts of the volunteers and the foreign help..."

 

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‘The volunteers saved Evia’: How grassroots fought the Greek fires

Fires have savaged the Greek island of Evia. Volunteers and grassroots efforts have helped save homes and lives.

www.csmonitor.com

Volunteers were the first – and at times only – line of defense against the wildfires that engulfed the Greek island of Evia this week, leaving charred olive trees in a sea of ashes.

Some were brave local youth. Others came from other parts of the country, shocked into action by the inadequacy of the government response as it scrambled to fight an unprecedented number of fires across multiple fronts, including the capital Athens.

 

[zahir]

Greece fires under control as reconstruction begins

 

[teqniq]

Flooding in Turkey now:

 

[Flavour]

Wonder how erdogan will blame the floods on the pkk

 

[zahir]

Abandoned to the flames on Evia – DW – 08/14/2021

After the devastating fires that have ravaged Greece's second-largest island, many of its residents are angry with their government. They believe the disaster could have been prevented.

www.dw.com

Alexandridi is facing financial ruin. Her entire livelihood has been destroyed. And yet fires are not an infrequent event on Evia: In the past, they always put them out themselves, she says. This time, though, the government's only concern was to evacuate people.

Alexandridi feels abandoned by her government. In her view, the crisis management strategy adopted by Athens was an absolute disaster. "The mistake they made was to simply evacuate the villages in order to avoid casualties," she says. They didn't have anything like enough resources to extinguish the fires, she says, and what they did have they concentrated on Athens.

Alexandridi says she did not see any firefighters taking part in efforts to fight the flames on Evia. "The only people helping were volunteers from our island," she reports. "Where anything has been saved, they were the ones who did it. It was three days before I saw a firefighter. I asked him, 'Where have you been?' He replied, 'Don't ask.'"

Many islanders have stories like this. A man from the neighboring town of Limni describes people using a hose to try and extinguish a burning pine tree, to stop it from falling onto their house. "The fire department just turned off the water," he reports.

Dimitris Giannakoulas, a restaurant owner, no longer believes a word the government says. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has promised swift, unbureaucratic compensation for the victims, but Giannakoulas sees these as empty words. "We're very disappointed," he says.

Giannakoulas refused to be evacuated. Instead, he and the other men from his village stayed and fought the flames. "The only reason our houses are still standing is that there were no strong winds," he explains.

The full extent of the disaster can be seen along the road leading up from the coast and over the mountains. Scorched earth as far as the eye can see. Fallen trees and power poles block the way. The last big fires were still raging around the village of Istiaia at the northern tip of the island until the early hours of Tuesday.

Thodoris, a young mechanic, is standing in the village square with two of his friends. They describe how, for days, they observed the fire department doing nothing to fight the fires. No planes were sent, either. "They said on TV that planes couldn't fly because the winds were too strong. But there was no wind," says Thodoris. He corroborates this with a video showing columns of smoke hanging motionless in the air.

It's more or less a miracle that Thodoris's village is still standing. "There was no organized response whatsoever," he says. "We took the fire department's hoses and put the fires out ourselves." Now, 143 firefighters and 46 modern fire engines from Poland stand in the parking lot. They arrived on Tuesday, when most of the fires were already extinguished.

Rafal Solowin, an officer with the Polish brigade sent to provide assistance, says they came as fast as they could. "As soon as Greece triggered the EU Civil Protection Mechanism, we left immediately. It took us three days to get here."

To the people of Evia, this is incomprehensible. Why did their government wait so long to call for help, when it was already struggling to cope with the fires in Athens?

Constantinos Liarikos, the head of development at WWF Greece, says this was a preventable disaster. "It has everything to do with the fact that, in these conditions of climate crisis, not enough is being done on prevention," he explains. "The government — like all the governments of recent decades — refuses to invest in preparing authorities, volunteers and citizens."

Liarikos says Athens was well aware of the existing shortcomings. A committee drew up a clear schedule for improvements after the Mati disaster — but was ignored. "In the years that have followed, nothing has been done, just as nothing was done after the fire disaster in 2007. Expert assessments are simply thrown in the trash," says Liarikos.

 

[wemakeyousoundb]

Russian water bomber crash in turkey with 8 people on board, no survivors.

 

[zahir]

Report on the volunteers fighting fires on Evia, from a couple of days ago.

 

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Greek countryside becoming more flammable | eKathimerini.com

Investing in more water-dropping aircraft and fire trucks will not bring the desired results in Greece. Authorities should rather change their model of forest management, placing more emphasis on prevention.

www.ekathimerini.com

Investing in more water-dropping aircraft and fire trucks will not bring the desired results in Greece. Authorities should rather change their model of forest management, placing more emphasis on prevention and reinforcing the role of the forest service, Johann Goldammer, an international fire expert who heads the Global Fire Monitoring Center, tells Kathimerini in this interview. Goldammer, who led the scientific committee tasked with investigating the underlying causes of the 2018 Mati tragedy and submitting proposals for reforming Greek fire protection, says that attention must be given to urban sprawl into forest landscapes, as well as reviewing the types of vegetation and building regulations. The fire ecologist also calls for the greater engagement of civil society in fire prevention and fire risk management.

 

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The Evia Wildfire and the Museum of Illusions - The Press Project - Ειδήσεις, Αναλύσεις, Ραδιόφωνο, Τηλεόραση

Although in Varybobi everything is fine and it’s only the forest that’s become charcoal, in Evia we weren’t so lucky. I arrived at our house there on Thursday. Part of…

thepressproject.gr

Let me put it another way: why did the state permit violation of the evacuation order? Shouldn’t it have enforced it, if it really was a matter of life and death? The state permitted the mass, public and severe circumvention of the order precisely because it lacked the legitimacy that true necessity bestows.

 

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SELF-ORGANIZATION OR CHAOS – the wildfires in Greece - Anarchist Communist Group

A statement from the Anarchist Federation in Greece on the ongoing wildfires and the disastrous management of the Greek State. We're on the cusp of a major environmental and social disaster. Whole regions of Greece are practically disappearing. Tens of thousands of people are losing their...

www.anarchistcommunism.org

We’re on the cusp of a major environmental and social disaster. Whole regions of Greece are practically disappearing. Tens of thousands of people are losing their livelihoods, losing all perspectives in their own country and are objectively becoming internal refugees. From the fires in Ilia in 2007, the fires in Mati in 2018 to today’s fires, we have the same pattern of destruction, the same data, the same perpetrators, the same criticism. It’s all said. Everything is known.

But we can’t ignore the fact that the situation right now is on edge. We don’t know what the next day will be like, and that’s literal. We don’t know what will happen tomorrow, in a fortnight, in two months. The disaster we are experiencing right now may be the prelude to what will happen tomorrow or within a month. We can see much worse things, and what’s at stake is the very nature and quality of our lives before they’re even in the hands of patterns and state. We say this having taken into account a number of factors.

1. Extreme weather phenomena will continue and intensify. Climate change, i.e. global warming as a result of capitalist production, is here. And we have every reason to expect that in the coming period there will be conditions conducive to infernos again. Or flooding.

2. The state cannot and will not fulfill its part of the contract in a contracting company. At all levels, he refuses to organize prevention and protection mechanisms or even completely fail to manage the technical part of that treaty. The state cares about its own interests and the only thing its political department cares about fires is the electoral cost in the electoral game. His entire strategy is aimed at protecting yourself, not protecting the social base. We can’t expect anything different in the upcoming fires.

3. The disaster will be followed by a communication party in which the state will deliver some money to the affected people, promise more and once the lights go out, forget the topic. Let us remember that they even ate the massive amount of solidarity money collected by the victims of the Elis fire in 2007. We also have nothing to expect from the State in terms of restoring the immediate needs of those who have lost everything.

4. Despite the enormous destruction that has taken place while writing this, there are still many forests that have not been burned across the country. What happened to Evia, Ilia and Attica could happen to the whole country on a much larger scale in the coming years. Far further away from the capital with more unfavorable conditions.

In light of these facts, we call on the social base in terms of locality, in villages, villages and cities to organize immediately and undertake to the extent possible any initiative to prevent fires and monitoring areas forests in their regions. The ‘run for their lives’ policy that the state has chosen as a strategy is meant to cause massive additional damage and possibly even more victims. Experience in this crisis itself has shown us that it was self-organizing and taking responsibility from the local population that saved what was saved. This needs to be multiplied.

Municipal and political authorities should be taken down the throat to mobilize mechanisms they have and equip self-organized local structures, projects and patrols. Take advantage of the voluntary contribution of non-local people who will come to help. Demand coordination and guidance from firefighters and even fire extinguishers by locals who have the ability and willingness to do so. With safety first, we must not run before we mobilize. Fire protection and forest protection in general must be radically reconfigured according to local communities. Take care of burning areas with the aim not only to regenerate forests but also to expand them.

But the social base must also be mobilized outside of ′′ dangerous areas “. Both for the immediate needs of internally displaced persons and for the political struggle for their rehabilitation immediately afterwards.
And in these disasters as in the past, we have also seen social solidarity manifest massively and spontaneously. We also saw the dynamics of self-organizing, its effectiveness and ingenuity. The different thing now is that the kind of crisis we’ve entered makes these occasional socio-sanitary demonstrations and despair necessary permanently.

We are on our own. And we have, on the one hand, the state and capital drying up while turning our everyday environment into ashes.

We have to take matters into our own hands or we have to settle for unprecedented levels of misery, unprecedented in what we’re not used to. We have to save nature and ourselves from the destructive tide of state and capital.

 

[zahir]

Fires still burning around Athens. This is in a different area to the earlier fires.

 

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Forest fire in Vilia, West Attica, out of control, raging for 3. consecutive day - Keep Talking Greece

For third consecutive day the forest fire is raging in Vilia, western Attica with firefighters despe

www.keeptalkinggreece.com

 

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Lessons that don't appear to have been learned from the fires in 2007.

(PDF) LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE DRAMATIC FIRES OF 2007 AND 2009 IN GREECE

PDF | The fire season of 2007 in Greece was the worst in the recent history of the country as it set new records in regard to damages and loss of life.... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate

www.researchgate.net

The fire season of 2007 in Greece was the worst in the recent history of the country as it set new records in regard to damages and loss of life. An account of what happened and the reasons that led to the disaster, such as extreme conditions, fuel build-up, wildland-urban interface development, citizen indifference, and poor firefighting are presented. The failure to address these problems, as evidenced by a major 2009 wildfire that burned 20000 ha a few km NE from Athens, is also discussed, leading to lessons that should be learned in order to avoid repetition of such disasters in the future.

 

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The Greek wildfires: What went wrong and what can be fixed?

An executive state and an elite whose priority is profit-making cannot lead the way in the struggle against wildfires.

www.aljazeera.com

For a third week wildfires are burning in Greece and there seems to be no end in sight for this summer of disaster. Attica is ablaze once again, this time in the southeast, and fires are burning near Sounio and northwest of Athens at Vilia.

 

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This is a reasonable summing up.

Greeks fret as crises mount: Will this time be different?

Anger over recent wildfires has exposed a deep-seated uncertainty in Greece: ‘Based on past experience,’ said one ecological expert, ‘again nothing will change.’

www.politico.eu

 

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Varoufakis on the background to this summer's fires.

Greece's deadly wildfires were sparked by 30 years of political failure | Yanis Varoufakis

The climate emergency and state neglect caused this disaster, says activist Yanis Varoufakis

www.theguardian.com